Tournaments are all about timing, from start all the way to the finish. The best teams can feel their way into the competition but you had better be good and you better time it right. If you are too relaxed at the start, you can find yourself back home quicker than you can say, ‘Scotland one point.’What is certainly the case is that the gloves are off now and the phoney war is well and truly over. The Dutch seemed to think they could cruise along after a breezy beginning but one mistake, one sending off later and the Oranje ducked out. The French took a while to get going but surely they had it under control? It was only when the Swiss decided to miss a penalty to go 2-0 up in the second half last night that they then decided the timing-their-run-late attitude was getting a bit on the tight side.

Clearly the French didn’t want to be out done in the excitement stakes and when they went 3-1 up, they decided they would like to have a thriller just like the Spanish did earlier in the day. N’Golo Kante must have been thinking, ‘Can’t we all just be a bit more professional, a bit less Gallic and just win the game without all the fuss?’ He had a point, our one-man midfield has had a long, hard season of covering acreage usually only covered by birds migrating from Africa to the Arctic Circle.

But no, extra time is de rigueur now and at least for those of us watching, it meant lots of fun. Less fun for the French in the end however, in particular for N’Golo and Olivier Giroud as their team lost on penalties, even if Olivier tucked his away neatly. You couldn’t even say it was against the run of play by the end. As the penalty comp started, was I the only one praying that N’Golo didn’t have to take a penalty? I am sure I wasn’t. The French got their timing badly wrong; they have gone out of the tournament without even managing to get into top gear at any point. So much for building your way into a tournament. The Swiss, like the Czech Republic, now find themselves looking up the meaning of the phrase ‘dark horses.’

It was a fine Euros up until yesterday, but now it is shaping up into being a nothing less than an absolute classic. The games in the knockout stage seem to start off in the first halves as tactical think pieces, then the referee blows for the start of the second half and it looks more like basketball tactics than football. Or as Jose Mourinho used to say, hockey matches.The 5-3 goal fest between Spain and Croatia was, to use a highly technical description, bonkers! Maybe the opening own-goal, credited to Pedri rather unfairly, set the scene. If this is the new way of the modern game, and they do say new styles in football often follow championships, then I love it.I suspect however it is more likely that the season has just produced players who are worn out and make more technical and mental errors because of their tiredness. Enjoy it while you can is my current thinking.

I thought when Cesar Azpilicueta leapt like the proverbial ‘tin of salmon’ to head in at the back post against Croatia after an hour, he might just have won the game, grabbed the headlines and made himself a national hero. In fact, there were still five more goals to be scored before the fans headed home. Doubtless both sides were still in a daze trying to count up what the actual final score was.After all this mayhem, I am travelling to the stadium for the big game today. Well, it is the big game if you happen to be Swedish or Ukrainian. I will not play with most of you by waxing lyrically about Andriy Shevchenko as a manager or the amazing success of the Swedish old school 4-4-2, because most of Europe will be concentrating not on Hampden Park where I will be, but Wembley Stadium were Kai Havertz, Timo Werner, Toni Rudiger, Reece James, Mason Mount and Ben Chilwell could all be locking horns. There is every chance that this could be another mad classic, I certainly hope so.

It may well be that Gareth Southgate would like a more sedate outing but there is a hope from many of us that he will get nothing of the sort. This is the time in a tournament when teams throw caution to the wind, even if the Latin temperaments of the French, Spanish and Portuguese are more suited to wild, open football than the temperaments of the English and the Germans are historically. An early goal for either side will certainly help the spectacle.Talking of history, even if the current players are too young to understand it, this game has and will have historical significance. Neither side is the clear favourite, but both sets of fans know just how important this will be in their nation’s football psyche. I am not English, but I know the importance of 1966 and all that, as well as a bunch of penalty shoot-outs. Oh, and of course a Frank Lampard goal that was miles over the line but not given. Today could make heroes and villains that will live long in the memory.So like everyone else I will be glued to the box watching on at 5pm, having done my prep on Ukraine and Sweden days in advance. I can’t wish ill favour on any Chelsea players, so I hope it is a memorable game and if I am brutally honest, I just hope that if it does go to penalties, like many more games will do between now and the end of the tournament, it isn’t one of our lads tonight that is trudging off like Kylian Mbappe yesterday. Knowing that however good you are, missing a penalty in a shoot-out that costs your nation progression, is something that is never forgotten by some people, however unfair that is. Just ask the England manager.